The most stimulating European novelist working? A professional provocateur? A moralist disguised as a pornographer? A fake disguised as a nihilist? An awkward genius? A rabidly lucid, virulent and sardonic writer? A merciless basher of Western society? What is clear is that Michel Houellebecq leaves no one indifferent.

The reader will find gathered here his first three novels, which launched him into literary stardom and placed him at the center of controversy, where he continues to reside. All three are carried out by disoriented and resentful beings, lethargic castaways from the consumer society. The central character of Battlefield Expansion is a depressed computer engineer who has been in chastity for two years; The Elementary Particles confronts two forty-something stepbrothers: a kind of scientific monk who has renounced sexuality and a literature professor who is a compulsive consumer of pornography; Platform, for its part, stars a timid and apathetic Parisian civil servant, who goes on vacation to a paradise of sex tourism and ends up setting up a business related to the matter while searching for pure love... Three visions – or better yet autopsies – fierce and sarcastic statements of the decadence of the West.

«Houellebecq plays with fire and he knows it. He writes about what hurts, what irritates him. He mocks both good taste and moral order... A true novelist »(Jérôme Garcin, Le Nouvel Observateur)

«The werewolf of French letters, a man who sinks his teeth, fierce, into everything that moves» (Rodrigo Fresán)

"By far the best French writer today and one of the three or four best in Europe" (Santiago Gamboa, El País)

«One of those writers whose work summarizes an era and gives a turn to the history of literature» (Benoît Duteurtre)

«Athlete of confusion, expert in nihilism, virtuoso of no future: Michel Houellebecq» (Pierre Assouline, Lire)

"Insolent and politically incorrect" (Julian Barnes).